TripIt Will Now Tell You The Safety Level Of Your Travel Location

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I’ve used TripIt as my “go to” website to organize my travel plans for the better part of a decade. Their system to take a series of emails and make a single trip itinerary made my travel planning so much easier. I no longer had to worry about having the email from my airline, rental car, hotel, restaurant, theater tickets and public transit maps organized before my trip because they did it all for me.

I was very interested when I recently received an email telling me about a new feature in the Tripit mobile apps.

Now TripIt shows safety scores from 1 to 100 for neighborhoods around the world, representing low to high risk. These scores cover a variety of categories, such as:

• Physical harm: including muggings, drug activity, gang prevalence, and police presence
• Women’s safety: including verbal harassment, physical assault, violence directed against women, and adequacy of women’s support facilities
• Health and medical: including environmental pollution and contamination, illnesses, regulation of sanitary conditions, and access to medical care
• Political freedoms: including political unrest, limited political rights, and incidences of riots and protests
• Theft: including petty theft, pickpocketing, burglaries, auto theft, and grand theft

Neighborhood safety scores are available in the TripIt app for all lodging, restaurants and activities that have an address.

I had to try this out for myself so I checked out a trip I have planned to Washington D.C. Here’s the ratings I received for my hotel:

I was glad to see that my hotel in D.C. was safe and locations I’ve booked in New Braunfels and Manhattan for upcoming trips have similar ratings. I’m not always expecting to stay in 100% safe locations but Sharon and I do our due diligence before booking a hotel, and having confirmation from an external resource is reassuring. I know that unforeseen things happen, such as our last hotel stay where the police were called on two out of the four nights (both times on the same couple staying down the hall from us). Long story.

Being a middle aged white male, I realize that I am generally immune from some of the horrible things in the world. I’ve never had to have someone walk me to my car to make sure that I was not sexually assaulted, called names, spit on, beat up because of {fill in the blank}, etc. Unfortunately, this is still a thing that over 50% of the population still needs to consider and I’m glad that technology is trying to play a part in helping everyone be safe. Whether it’s safety ratings from Tripit or the ability to call 911 for help from the Uber app, I’m all for it. If even one person is protected by these services, it’s worth it. Kudos to companies who care for all of their customers.

What do you think about websites rating the safety of cities, hotels, restaurants, clubs and tourist sites? Would you avoid a location if it had a bad rating or just be more careful?

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